Monday, September 15, 2008

Are happy kids dumb kids?

Did you live a coddled childhood filled with unbridled playtime and few reminders of the harsh real world? You might have been dumber as a result.

Children coaxed into a jovial mood performed worse on a simple test of geometric shape recognition than kids put in a dourer mood, report Simone Schnall, of the University of Plymouth, UK and colleagues in a recent issue of Developmental Science.

You may wonder whether these psychologists hate happy kids or just fun, but their conclusion is supported by other research. For instance, adults in good spirits do worse than sad adults on similar tests.

To uncover the same effect in children, the researchers, thankfully, didn't resort to insults or mind-altering drugs.

Instead they played one of two classical tunes to 10- and 11-year olds. Fifteen kids heard Mozart's jolly ditty Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, while the other 15 had to suffer through Mahler's doleful Adagietto. Previous research suggested these songs put kids in happy and sad moods, respectively, and Schnall's team confirmed that by surveying the kids.

While listening to the tunes the children played a game where they hunted for a specific geometric shape ? a triangle joined to a rectangle, for instance ? within a picture. The merry Mozart kids took noticeably longer finding the shapes than the children who were forced to listen to Mahler.

Not content with proving that happy pre-teens are daft, the researchers aimed their hypothesis at 61 six and seven-year olds. Instead of hearing classical music, the kids watched three movie scenes.

One, from Disney's Jungle Book, features the singing and dancing of an ebullient bear. A neutral scene from The Last Unicorn shows a knight reaching a castle. The sad scene comes from The Lion King, another Disney cartoon. Even this reporter, who watched the movie as a teen, shed a tear when Simba mourns his father's death.

In the same shape recognition test administered after the movie scene, the happy kids proved slower at picking out shapes than those who watched the neutral Last Unicorn or the lugubrious Lion King scenes.

Schnall's team offers several explanations for their results. Mood could directly alter cognitive thinking, and in a happy state people have little desire to question what they see, while "sadness indicates something is amiss, triggering detail-oriented analytical processing," they write.

Alternatively, happy people could be so caught up in their personal high that they ignore details or they distract themselves from the task at hand.

This could be hand-waving - it seems just as likely that Mozart and The Jungle Book are more distracting than Mahler and The Lion King. Because the kids tended to ignore the music played before the test, the researchers dismiss this possibility, but anyone who's taken a six-year old to a Disney film knows that the catchy songs don't vanish from their brains in just a few minutes.

But there's some encouraging news, at least, for cheerful kids and their parents. Children in a good mood perform better on tasks that demand creative and flexible thinking, previous studies show.

So the take-home message may be - contrary to popular opinion - that happy kids end up as artists and poets, while sad and angry children become accountants.

The paper's last sentence seems directed toward parents of these future artists: "Artificially inflating a child's mood may have unintended and possibly undesirable cognitive consequences."

Reiss, an evolutionary biologist but also an ordained Church of England priest, says that the increasing Muslim population, as well as growing numbers of Christian fundamentalists, in Britain mean that the issue should be "gently" tackled in science classes.

How dismaying, as we approach the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species and the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin, that we are still treating with kid gloves a religious view that is manifestly unscientific. Sure, talk about creationism in religious education classes, but keep it out of the science class.

It's been a fantastic week for science, with the start of the LHC at Cern allowing us to tackle some of the deepest questions in the universe. Likewise, a festival of science should be about celebrating the explanatory power of science, not making concessions to extreme forms of religion.

Update: the Royal Society has put out a statement affirming that it is opposed to creationism being taught as science.

In a statement Reiss has also clarified his comments. "When young people ask questions about creationism in science classes, teachers need to be able to explain to them why evolution and the Big Bang are scientific theories but they should also take the time to explain how science works and why creationism has no scientific basis."

Well, no-one would argue with that. But it's a bit different from implying that creationism should be taught alongside science, as he did when he said that "in certain classes, it can be appropriate to deal with the issue".Rowan Hooper, online news editor

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

A temple for the worship of science

"Praise be to Darwin!

We are gathered here today to give thanks to those scientists who have given us something to sustain our spirits in this time of religious vacuity. Not that we believe there is such a thing as a spirit, or a soul, but you know what I mean."

This, I imagine, is the sort of thing that might kick off "science worship" sermons in the "Atheon" - a two-story downtown Berkeley building conceived "to provide a spiritual home for rational people in California".

Until that happy day when Atheons are built for those of us who don't live in San Francisco, the Atheon website (due to go live later on Sept 10) will have to do. According to a press release, the website will glow with the cosmic microwave background radiation, "so that people everywhere will be able to turn off their lights and set up a miniature shrine to science on their home computer".

What should we sacrifice at such a shrine?

Update: Keats sent me an MP3 file of the canon he composed for the Atheon, "Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing". Click here to listen to it but be warned: Keats says the canon is best heard through headphones "as the universes sing very quietly".

I asked Keats whether he thought there was any demand among scientists for an Atheon.

"Both the Brights movement and the Beyond Belief conference do seem to suggest as much," he says. "As an artist, I'm not one to judge the merits of making science a replacement for religion. I'm merely trying to provide a space in which it might happen."

Friday, September 05, 2008

LHC: Top 5 best and worst things that could happen

A few days ago I told you why the world is not going to end on September 10, when the LHC is switched on. So what is going to happen? Here's my list of best and worst things that could happen when the LHC finally starts smashing protons together:

The best

1. Time travellers from the future appear and say hello. Admittedly this isn't very likely, but theorists have shown that it is possible in principle. And it would be rather spectacular.

2. The smart money is on the LHC creating the famous Higgs boson, so we would finally know why things weigh what they do.

3. Special long-lived version of a particle called a gluino could be spat out. These could stick inside one the LHC?s giant detectors and decay when the accelerator is switched off. If this happened it would tell us that our universe is just one of many, many universes.

4. The LHC might show that extra dimensions of space exist. Some physicists believe this would be the LHC?s most profound discovery because it tells us string theory is on the right lines.

5. Nothing happens. If absolutely nothing new turns up at the LHC, it would shake fundamental physics to the core. It would tell us that all our understanding of forces and particles is wrong and we?d have to go back to the drawing board.

Worst things:

1. The lights go out in Geneva. The LHC consumes 120 megawatts of power, about the same as Geneva and its environs. CERN gets its electricity from both France and Switzerland, so a blackout is unlikely.

2. The proton beams become unstable and crash uncontrollably into a detector. At full pelt, each beam contains enough energy to melt 500 kilograms of copper. If a beam smashed directly into one the LHC?s giant experiments, it would fry the detectors. Engineers have built several safety systems to stop this happening.

3. Fewer party balloons. The LHC?s superconducting magnets are cooled with 120 tonnes of superfluid helium. Top ups will be needed if there are power cuts or problems with the magnets.

Thursday, September 04, 2008

The closest thing to Jedi mind tricks

Though neuroscience will never peer inside of Luke Skywalker or Yoda's head to find the brain region responsible for feeling the Force, a new study comes close.

Trained Zen Buddhists return to a state of inner calm faster than people who don't practice meditation, according to neuroscientist Giuseppe Pagnoni and his colleagues at Emory University in Atlanta.

The researchers scanned the brains of 12 Buddhists, who were experienced in Zen meditation, and 12 controls, while the subjects focused on breathing. Unlike other forms of mediation that focus on withdrawal, Zen meditation calls for vigilance and attention.

At random intervals, a string of letters appeared on a computer screen inside the functional-MRI scanner, and each subject had to decide whether the string represented a real word or gibberish, and then press a button.

The control subjects proved as fast and accurate as the Buddhists at determining that "fiddle" and "moose" were real words, while "calake" and "mobble" were fakes. When Pagnoni's team took snapshots of each subject's brain while meditating before each word appeared, Zen Buddhists returned to their meditative state noticeably faster than control subjects.

Since their test measured responses to words, most of the areas that changed during the task are related to language and located in the brain?s left hemisphere.

These areas represent the internal chatter of an idle brain, Pagnoni speculates. A mentally demanding task snaps our brains to action and out of this state, which he called the default network. "If you are driving and there are a lot of cars coming, your mind cannot wander," he says.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Eight cold facts

This week, New Scientist will be telling you all about the common cold: why researchers are treating it with new respect, and what the chances are that we will ever cure it (hint: humans could be walking on the moon again first). But in writing the article, I ran into a staggering amount of mis- (and myth-) information people swear to about colds. In fact some beliefs that had previously been dismissed may be true: for instance, "catching a chill" might make you more likely to succumb to a cold virus. Then again, some really are nonsense.

1. Colds are caused by a weakened immune system. NOT NORMALLYSome people with perfectly robust immune systems get colds every winter. Others contract cold viruses but suffer nary a sniffle. Cold symptoms are caused by your immune reactions to viruses that infect your nose and throat - "stronger" reactions might even make you sicker. But really weak immunity can allow cold viruses to spread further, and kill.

2. Colds happen in winter because central heating dries out your nose. NOExperiments show that once a cold virus gets in your nose humidity makes little difference. Inhaling steam may or may not help, but warming your nose to 43░C might, and if you have a rhinovirus, spraying your nose with acid (pH4) might help. Some think rhinoviruses, which are related to the enteroviruses that cause diarrhoea, are gut bugs that lost their acid tolerance so can no longer get past the stomach. But some do both: hence, the combined misery of "stomach flu".

3. Stress causes colds. YESIf you get a cold virus in your nose, you will become infected and develop symptoms, or not, depending on your immune system, which is affected by stress and emotions. Colds are more likely if you recently had a big life event - job loss, death in the family, marriage - and if you were poor as a toddler, because your immune system triggers inflammation reactions more readily. If you are usually happy and calm you may be three times less likely to get sick than if you are anxious, hostile and depressed. And if you are the famous American composer Leonard Bernstein, the symptoms disappear when you're absorbed in conducting Mahler's fifth symphony, only to return for the curtain call.

4. Feed a cold and starve a fever. MAYBEColds rarely give adults fevers. Other diseases that do, such as malaria, might get better faster if you stop eating minerals and vitamins that the germ needs even more than you do. But the muscle pain of even mild colds is caused by muscle wasting, as the body recycles proteins into defensive chemicals. Eating more protein instead could help, and hurt less. So between its warming effect on your upper respiratory tract (and your mood), and the protein, it's true: chicken soup should help.

5. Blowing your nose helps clear out the virus. NOOpinion is divided as to whether a runny nose or indeed any cold symptoms actually eliminate viruses: relieving symptoms with painkillers, antihistamines and decongestants (not antibiotics!) doesn't seem to hurt and more of it could save lots of money in lost work and useless doctor's visits. But a blocked nose is usually down to dilated blood vessels, not snot, and blowing won't help. Blowing your nose forcefully however can drive viruses and inflammatory substances into your sinuses and spread the misery.

6. Green snot means you need antibiotics. NOMucus turns yellow or green whenever you have a bad respiratory infection, viral or bacterial. The colour comes from myeloperoxidase, an enzyme in white blood cells which uses an iron-containing haem molecule, which is green, to catalyse chemical reactions that kill germs.

7. Large doses of Vitamin C prevent colds. NOT UNLESS YOU RUN MARATHONS OR WORK OUT IN THE SNOWThis idea, first put about by Nobel laureate Linus Pauling in the 1970s, has been repeatedly disproved but refuses to die. Still, there may be a bit to it: last year a review of research to date, found vitamin C had little effect on most people, but it halved the risk of getting colds for marathon runners, skiers and soldiers on subarctic exercises. It does not cure colds. And while we're here, the herb Echinaceamay shorten colds a bit but it has side effects and doesn't prevent colds. Zinc lozenges work better.

8. Red wine helps. YESFinally, some good news. Contrary to some people's optimistic beliefs, red wine doesn't cure colds, though it may (initially) dull the pain. But a study in Spain found that people who drank more than 14 glasses of red wine a week (but not spirits or beer) cut their risk of getting a cold by almost half. íSalud!

Tamas Bereczkei, a biologist at the University of Pecs, Hungary, and his colleagues mapped the faces of 67 young, long-term couples at their university, as well as each parent, measuring facial proportions such as the ratios of face length to width, nose length to face height, and mouth width to height.

Based on these numbers, Bereczkei's team found that, overall, the face of a woman's boyfriend's more closely resembles her father's than the faces of other males in the study. The correlation was most striking for measurements of the centre of the face, such as the ratios between nose length to face height and eye width to face height.

Men also dated women whose faces more closely resembled their mothers than other women in the study. But here, men seemed to focus on the lower part of the face. The ratios between jaw and face width and lip fullness (height) and width of their mothers and girlfriends tended to match.

These findings hint at a process well documented in animals - and only beginning to emerge from studies of humans - called sexual imprinting. Exposure to adults can bias young animals to pick future mates that resemble their parents.

This could be evolution's way of maintaining adaptations to local environments. Mating with someone too different from you and your parents could compromise such adaptations.

On the other hand, the same process might also dissuade animals from picking mates that look too similar to their parents and even siblings to hold onto a modicum genetic diversity, which could come in handy if environmental conditions change or disease erupts. This is called optimal inbreeding.

And while studies in animals have found the same kind of opposite sex imprinting, "we do not know the precise mechanism of imprinting-like phenomenon in humans," Bereczkei says.

Although Obama asserts that America's "talent for innovation is still the envy of the world", it sometimes seems he doesn't really believe it. In around half of his responses he airs concerns over the lack of progress America is making in science. Stating how China is the world's leading technology exporter, he reckons the "competitive situation may only worsen over time". Why the negativity Obama?

However the senator's answers certainly suggest there could be a resurgence in American R&D. So what is Obama planning for science policy if he becomes president?

First up is science innovation and education. Obama wants to provide broadband internet connection for all Americans to boost science, technology, engineering and maths achievement in students. Hmmm. I suppose there should be equal opportunity for all students to surf the internet in search of a model answer to those perplexing essay questions. After all, file sharing isn't restricted to films, games, music, software programs, videos?

But perhaps I'm being overly cynical. We should commend Obama for his strategies to combat global climate change with aims of reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and his proposal to "create a Technology Transfer Program dedicated to exporting climate-friendly technologies, including green buildings, clean coal and advanced automobiles, to developing countries to help them combat climate change." And he says he would be equally committed to applying the technology in the States first.

To complement the policy, he will also expand funding in research looking into energy resources that reduce greenhouse gas emission and avoid energy wastage. But let's not forget what America could do for the rest of the world: "I will also encourage communities around the nation to design and build sustainable communities that cut energy use."

Changes would appear in the life sciences and space technology as well, where he would lift the current ban on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, support recommendations on genetic engineering as proposed by the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee, and re-establish the National Aeronautics and Space Council to "expand our reach into the heavens and improve life here on Earth."

Overall, Obama has set himself some ambitious targets for American science and technology to address the fact that America is "reducing support for science at a time when many other nations are increasing it, a situation that already threatens our leadership in many critical areas of science."

But I can't help wondering what his motives are for the proposals: is it really to improve the world we live in or is it to catch up with other leading nations in science and technology? If the latter, I would be interested to see how other nations will respond should Obama become president. Before then, it would also be interesting to see what his rival for the White House, John McCain, proposes to do.Gursharan Randhawa, New Scientist contributor

Why the world WON'T end on September 10

Hurray for the European Court of Human Rights. It has rejected an emergency injunction to block the Large Hadron Collider from turning on on 10 September. It's the latest legal case brought against the LHC by scientists who fear that the world's largest particle accelerator will produce fearsome entities that could destroy the Earth.

I'm thrilled that the ECHR has understood the science and has given the LHC the green light. Because let's get something straight: the world is not going to end on 10 September.

Here's why. Next week physicists will attempt to send a beam of protons all the way round the LHC's 27-kilometre ring for the very first time. What they won't do is accelerate the beam to its design energy of 7 teraelectronvolts (TeV). And unless the tests are very, very successful, they won't be smashing protons head on either.

Instead, a lone beam of protons will make its way round with just 450 gigelectronvolts of energy. The only collisions that could happen is if the beam smashes into one of the very few air molecules that haven't been sucked out of the ring, which has a vacuum 10 times better than on the moon.

Supposing this does happen, the collision energy will be a paltry 30 gigaelectronvolts (30 GeV). That's a far cry from the 14 TeV collision energy that the LHC will produce when it is running at full speed. You simply can't make much in the way of heavy, exotic particles with just 30 GeV of energy. No top quarks, no W or Z particles, no Higgs bosons. And that's just the regular stuff: there certainly is not enough energy to make mini black holes, strangelets, magnetic monopoles or anything else exotic that critics purport could destroy the Earth.

OK, so we have a reprieve of a few months until physicists finish their tests and start creating collisions with 14 TeV of energy. What will happen then? This is uncharted territory for particle accelerators. And the trouble with venturing into the unknown is that you don't know what will be there. This is what excites physicists and, perhaps understandably, is grist for the mill for doom-mongers.

Theorists have speculated about all manner of things popping into existence, including the infamous mini black holes. Critics claim that these will grow uncontrollably as they suck in matter, eventually gobbling everything in their path. One such opponent is Otto Rossler, a theoretical chemist at the University of Tubingen in Germany, and one of the plaintiffs in the ECHR case. He claims that in the worst case, the Earth could be eaten by a mini black hole in 50 months.

Really, I don't think so. I admit I have a hard time believing theorists' usual line that Stephen Hawking will save us. Hawking's most famous research shows that black holes - the giant ones we see in space - slowly evaporate due to a process called Hawking radiation. Being much smaller, mini black holes should evaporate within microseconds. Trouble is, no one has seen Hawking radiation. So why should I put humanity's hopes in a theoretical physicist?

No, for me, there is a much more compelling argument why the LHC won't destroy the world. And it doesn't rely on theoretical flights of fancy. Whatever the LHC churns up out of all the collision energy, we've been there before. Cosmic rays from outer space are raining down on us all the time and they can reach truly staggering energies. You can get the same collision energy as the LHC from a 108-GeV cosmic ray slamming into the atmosphere. And there are plenty of cosmic rays with such energies.

Cosmic ray experiments all over the world - experiments that have nothing to do with the CERN laboratory where the LHC is based - have found that about 10-14 rays with energy greater than the LHC strike each square centimetre of Earth every second. That might not sound like much. But over the Earth?s 4.5 billion year lifetime, that makes 1022 collisions or 100,000 times more than the LHC will ever produce. Obviously, in that time no mini black holes, vacuum bubbles, killer strangelets or any other weird effects have eaten the planet.

Not convinced? Scale the cosmic ray sums up to cover the 100 billion stars in the Milky Way and the 100 billion galaxies in the visible universe and you find that nature has already made the equivalent of 1031 LHCs. Or if you like, 10 trillion LHCs are running every second. And we're still here.Valerie Jamieson, deputy features editor

Do we need help making sensible decisions?

Every time I see a news report of a plane crash, wherever it is in the world, my mind races forward to any flight I might have to take in the coming months and whether I might just drive or take the train instead. Am I paranoid?

If I am, then a lot of other people are too. In the year after 9/11, many Americans chose to drive rather than take domestic flights. Understandable, but unfortunately it wasn't such a great decision: an extra 1600 people died in road accidents that year as a result - that's six times the number who died in the hijacked aircraft.

We might think we know what we're doing when we take these kinds of decisions, but we generally don't. At times of risk, when we feel threatened or fearful, emotion overrides reason and we end up making rather poor choices. Can we do anything about that?

A lot of researchers think we can - that we can be helped to counteract our instinctive reaction to a risky situation and reason our way to a better choice (see our How to keep your head in scary situations feature).

What do they have in mind? One idea is to present statistics about, say, health risks, in ways that don't leave people cold - for example, put them in the context of a narrative. "Feel the numbers", as one expert puts it, so we can connect with them more easily when emotions are running high.

That's all very well when you've grown up viewing numbers as abstract entities in a world of their own. Time to rethink the way we teach mathematics, then.

Another example of how people could be "helped" in their decisions about risks comes from some remarkable findings by a team at Yale Law School.

These show that the single most important factor in determining how we judge the risks of issues such as nuclear power, nanotechnology, vaccination and climate change is the degree to which we share the cultural world-view of the person giving us the information. If they have different values or political sympathies to us, we are predisposed to reject their arguments, irrespective of what we thought previously. It's all about the messenger, in other words.

On the surface it sounds to me like a good idea to use insights like these in public policy to steer people towards wiser judgements.

This taps into something of a zeitgeist: both the Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and David Cameron, leader of the Conservative party in the UK, have recently sought the advice of two University of Chicago professors whose recent book, Nudge, describes ways governments might "nudge" people into doing things that are good for them, or for society. For example, introduce automatic enrolment in pension and organ donation schemes unless people opt out (inertia means most people stay in).

But this kind of "libertarian paternalism" is not to everyone's taste because it involves a degree of manipulation. It's one thing for a government to intervene to stop people harming others, quite another for it to intervene to stop them harming themselves, particularly if the nudging is undisclosed. Is that what government should be for?

It seems to me this is a debate we shall need to have, especially as we learn more about the way people respond to risks. Of course, there are some smart things societies could do without government intervention ? such as demand that the media report shocking or traumatic news in a more balanced way. That includes us!

Psychologists have known for some time that we seriously overestimate our chances of dying in a knife attack or plane crash because the extensive use of graphic media coverage makes it so much easier for us to bring such events to mind, a phenomenon known as the "availability rule".

On the other hand, we tend to underestimate our chances of getting diseases because these are usually only reported as statistics. Many researchers claim this bias is the root of much of our poor decision-making. As one of them puts it, we aren't rational enough to be exposed to the modern press.

Until any of these changes happen, the best thing is to stop watching the TV and reading the newspapers. Not the science magazines, though ? where else would you get such evidence-based advice as to stop reading the newspapers?

And a final thought, for those who are uncomfortable with any attempt to "nudge" us into better decision-making, remember that in this regard we are already seriously handicapped. If anything, translating good science into nudges could help us choose more wisely than ever before.